Immersion Blender Tomato Sauce

Home made tomato sauce makes a huge difference in Italian style cooking - pizza, pasta, meat dishes. And while I love making my own sauce, the time involved has always been a bit off putting. Mainly it was the effort of cutting all of the ingredients into small enough pieces so that the sauce was not overly chunky. Using the food processor to cut the vegetables only delivered a gritty consistency. But recently I have perfected a method using the immersion blender as the time saving hero. If you don't have one of these, they are not expensive (less than $30) and are incredibly versatile

The Ingredients:

• One large onion
• Two carrots
• Two celery
• One small or 1/2 large green bell pepper
• Five to eight large garlic cloves
• A handful of fresh Italian parsley
  
• Three large cans of tomatoes (I prefer San Marzano region Italian tomatoes but they are quite a bit more expensive. Progresso brand is good too)
• One small can tomato paste
• Two serrano chiles
• Olive Oil
  
• Salt
• Oregano
• Basil
• Thyme
• Red Wine

Cut the onion, carrot, celery, and green pepper into larger pieces and sweat them in a substantial amount of olive oil over medium low heat covered for for 20 minutes. Add the garlic, also cut in large pieces at the 10 minute mark.

Don't skimp on the olive oil. I use around 3/4 of a cup. You're making a lot of sauce and this is an important flavor component.

Veggies at the start of sweating

Veggies at the end of 20 minutes

Roughly cut your parsley and chiles. Take the seeds out of the chiles.

Add your tomatoes, tomato paste, chiles, parsley, oregano, basil, and thyme

Oops - don't forget the red wine - around a half a cup (the flavor compounds in various ingredients are soluble in either fat, water, or alcohol so having a little of each in a dish helps bring out the fullness of your flavors).

Cook the sauce for two hours at a medium low heat with the cover ajar so it is bubbling softly but not boiling rapidly.

Now the fun part!

Get your immersion blender. (Man Battle Stations!)

And let it do its magic (Damn the Torpedos! Full Speed Ahead!)


The Result?

A smooth wonderfully flavored sauce.

I stored just the right amoung for one pizza (One cup) in Ziplock bags in the freezer along with frozen balls of dough so we can quickly whip up a pizza if we want to.

Give it a try. It's not hard and worth the effort.